This week's progressive playbook is as easy to predict as (abc.) Distract attention from the Obamacare debacle, by stirring up the illegal immigration debate. The Marxist Democratic Party of America will find willing, cowardly accomplices, in the persons of Elitist Progressive Republican Party of America. They will be counting on the distraction, and willful ignorance, of Americans, to put this final death nail in the heart of Liberty's last stronghold. Let's make sure they counted wrong. This link with the single caption, 'WE KNOW THE TRUTH,' is all you need to bombard your "representatives," with irrefutable evidence of the deceptive,...

Egyptian security and medical officials say an American has been killed in the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria during clashes between supporters and opponents of Egypt's embattled President Mohammed Morsi. Alexandria security chief Gen. Amin Ezz Eddin told Al-Jazeera TV that an American was killed Friday in Sidi Gabr Square while photographing the battles between opposition youth and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, from which Morsi hails. A medical official told The Associated Press the American was wounded by gunshots and died at the hospital. SNIP Six Egyptians have been killed in days of clashes ahead of nationwide protests Sunday...

All can agree that the Obama administration is mired in myriads of scandals, but as yet no one can quite figure out what they all mean and where they will lead. Benghazi differs from all the other scandals — and from both Watergate and Iran-Contra — because in this case administration lapses led to the deaths of four Americans. Nine months later, the administration’s problems of damage control remain fourfold: (a) there was ample warning that American personnel were in danger in Libya, and yet requests for increased security were denied; (b) during the actual attack, the American tradition of...

The short but profitable tale of how 483,000 private individual have "top secret" access to the nation's most non-public information begins in 2001. "After 9/11, intelligence budgets were increased, new people needed to be hired, it was a lot easier to go to the private sector and get people off the shelf," and sure enough firms like Booz Allen Hamilton - still two-thirds owned by the deeply-tied-to-international-governments investment firm The Carlyle Group - took full advantage of Congress' desire to shrink federal agencies and their budgets by enabling outside consultants (already primed with their $4,000 cost 'security clearances') to fulfill...

The Washington Post has published a remarkable report showing that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been monitoring the central servers of major Internet companies -- Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple -- and "extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time." Why did a government source leak information of this program, dubbed "PRISM," to the Post? What follows is perhaps the most chilling paragraph I've read to date about U.S. government surveillance: Firsthand experience with these systems,...

The U.S. government can require gun dealers in border states to disclose records of certain firearm sales, a federal appeals court has ruled, upholding a key component of the government’s recent crackdown on illegal gun trafficking. The ruling on Friday, by a unanimous three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Washington, comes over strenuous objection by the firearms industry. And it could renew calls among gun-rights supporters that the government’s program trammels rights of gun sellers and owners. In 2011, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearm and Explosives began issuing so-called “demand letters”...

PHOENIX (CBS5) - Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officials say the man who owns the SUV that struck and killed a Phoenix police officer is not in the country legally.((snip)) "In March 2012, ICE placed Mr. Cabrera-Molina in removal proceedings and detained him following his incarceration in the Maricopa County Jail on a charge unrelated to this most recent arrest. Mr. Cabrera-Molina was ordered released from ICE custody in May 2012 after he posted the $5,000 bond granted by an immigration judge with the Department of Justice's Executive Office of Immigration Review. His removal proceedings remain pending at this time. In...

Authorities say a shooting spree through Orange County, Calif., has left four people dead, including the shooter, and two others injured before the man stopped and shot himself to death in a stolen car, police said. The shootings began early Tuesday morning when deputies responded to a call in Ladera Ranch, a sleepy inland town about 55 miles southeast of Los Angeles. They found a woman shot multiple times. Police have identified the gunman as Ali Syed, a 20-year-old unemployed part-time student. Police say Syed lived at the Laderaa Ranch residence where the first victim was killed.

The men and women charged with enforcing federal immigration law are being prohibited from doing so by the Obama administration, according to Chris Crane, president of the union that represents officers and agents employed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “I think most Americans assume that ICE agents and officers are empowered by the government to enforce the law,” Crane said on Wednesday at Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on immigration reform. “Nothing could be further from the truth. With 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S., ICE agents are now prohibited from arresting illegal aliens...

NAFBPO rejects the President's proposal out of hand. It is unacceptable in that it contains not so much as a nod to immigration enforcement or a secure border. It is predicated upon administration claims that the border is secure now, or at least, secure enough. That claim is at best wishful thinking but is more likely willful misdirection of the public's opinion of the situation. A study of Border Patrol operations by the Government Accountability Office indicates that the Border Patrol is about 60% effective, a deplorable figure even if accurate. NAFBPO members maintain contacts with many field officers and...

President Obama and the Department of Homeland Security care more about “special interests” in the Democratic campaign base than the lives of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the ICE union boss told Congress today. “Death or serious injury to ICE officers and agents appears more acceptable to ICE, DHS, and Administration leadership, than the public complaints that would be lodged by special interest groups representing illegal aliens,” Chris Crane, president of the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement 118, told the House Judiciary Committee this afternoon. Crane based that statement on the way government policies handcuff the ICE officers charged...

HOUSTON (KTRK) -- The sight of Army helicopters and the sound of gunfire created a lot of concern Monday afternoon in one Houston neighborhood. We received a lot of phones calls, Tweets and Facebook posts from worried neighbors, wondering what was going on. SkyEye 13 HD was over the south side where at first look, it appeared there was a massive SWAT scene happening. With military helicopters flying above her southeast Houston neighborhood, Frances Jerrals didn't know what to think. "When you see this, you think the worst. When you hear this, you think the worst," Jerrals said. And so,...

The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region. For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens. If the base is approved, the most likely location for it would be in Niger, a largely desert nation on the eastern border...

The authorities in Yemen have seized a boat in their territorial waters filled with a large quantity of explosives, weapons and money, according to American officials briefed on the interdiction. The officials said Monday that there were indications that Iran was smuggling the military contraband to insurgents inside Yemen, although they declined to provide details. The captured weapons included surface-to-air missiles used to shoot down civilian and military aircraft, C4 military-grade explosives, 122-millimeter shells, rocket-propelled grenades and bomb-making equipment, including electronic circuits, remote triggers and other hand-held explosives, the statement said. If the weapons turn out to include the Iranian-made...

As the U.S. government continues to expand surveillance and monitoring systems to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars within the borders of the United States, a recent announcement regarding the country’s southern air defense systems is raising eyebrows. Our southern border is, in part, protected by the Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS), which utilizes moored balloons hovering at about 15,000 feet to identify low flying aircraft and missiles that may penetrate the border and cross into U.S. airspace. The system is utilized by the U.S. Air Force, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and U.S. Customs and Border...

New York Times ^ | January 13, 2013 | ADAM NOSSITER, ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI.

French fighter jets struck deep inside Islamist strongholds in northern Mali on Sunday, shoving aside months of international hesitation about storming the region after every other effort by the United States and its allies to thwart the extremists had failed. For years, the United States tried to stem the spread of Islamic militancy in the region by conducting its most ambitious counterterrorism program ever across these vast, turbulent stretches of the Sahara. But as insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this nation’s elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were...

An Egyptian magazine claims that six American Islamist activists who work with the Obama administration are Muslim Brotherhood operatives who enjoy strong influence over U.S. policy. The Dec. 22 story published in Egypt's Rose El-Youssef magazine (read an IPT translation here) suggests the six turned the White House "from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood." The story is largely unsourced, but its publication is considered significant in raising the issue to Egyptian readers. The six named people include: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland...

MEXICO CITY -- Only days after U.S. Marine veteran Jon Hammar was thrown into a Mexican prison for carrying an antique shotgun into the country, gangsters in the jail warned him of his likely fate – beheading.

Adel Radi Saker al Wahabi al Harbi, Muhsin al Fadhli's deputy. The US Treasury Department announced today that it has designated Adel Radi Saqr al Wahabi al Harbi, who is "a key member of an al Qaeda network operating in Iran and led by Iran-based al Qaeda facilitator Muhsin al Fadhli." This same network was previously headed by another al Qaeda operative, Yasin al Suri, but al Fadhli took over as chief of al Qaeda's Iran-based network in late 2011. Al Harbi serves as al Fadhli's deputy. In that capacity, according to Treasury, al Harbi "facilitates the travel of...

BISBEE — Two U.S. Border Patrol agents communicated by radio with agent Nicholas Ivie prior to the Oct. 2 shooting that resulted in his death in a remote area of southern Cochise County, based on information released by the Sheriff’s Office on Friday. Several reports totaling 39 pages were released to the media after a public records request. Some information in the documents has been redacted, including the names of the surviving agents and most ballistics evidence. Ivie, 30, was fatally shot on Oct. 2 at around 1:30 a.m., when he and two other Border Patrol agents responded to a...

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities. So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling...

Frank Gaffney neatly recaps a slew of breaking reports by Catherine Herridge, Aaron Klein and Clare Lopez concerning what might have drawn the late Amb. Christopher Stevens to Benghazi on September 10 and 11. The diferent strands of this developing story indicate that Stevens may have been there to oversee or inspect an ongoing covert CIA operation to supply weapons and men to the jihadist-dominated "rebels" fighting Syria's Assad. Stevens' last meeting, after all, was with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin. Turkey, of course, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, is a leading supporter of the "rebels" fighting to ovethrow...

The truth about the deadly terrorist attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi is trickling out slowly. The latest development is found in a classified cable obtained by Fox News that reveals the compound in Libya was unprepared to withstand a “coordinated attack” due to lack of security and other issues. Appearing on Fox News with Greta Van Susteren on Thursday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) revealed two more interesting pieces of the Benghazi puzzle. First, that U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens rang Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks on Sept. 11 to tell him the consulate was under attack. “He said...

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Obama régime has been running guns and armaments and munitions to the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate jihadist groups, including heat-seeking shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles designed to shoot down jetliners. The American Mission in Libya was apparently trying to buy back man-portable anti-aircraft missiles that the Obama Régime sold or gave to the Muslim Brotherhood and then went "missing." The Administration was also trying to buy back weapons previously owned by the Gaddafi Régime that spread everywhere after the "revolution." Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, told CNN he has seen the same...

WASHINGTON - On Monday, Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote a letter to President Obama in response to White House assertions about the military response to the September 11, 2012 attack in Libya. The full text of the letter can be found below: ***SNIP*** There appears to be a discrepancy between your directive and the actions taken by the Department of Defense. As we are painfully aware, despite the fact that the military had resources in the area, the military did not deploy any assets to secure U.S. personnel in Benghazi during the...

When the bodies of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya, arrived at Andrews Air Force Base after the Sept. 11 attack, they were greeted by the president, the vice president and the secretaries of state and defense. Conspicuously absent was CIA Director David Petraeus. Officials close to Mr. Petraeus say he stayed away in an effort to conceal the agency's role in collecting intelligence and providing security in Benghazi. Two of the four men who died that day, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, were former Navy SEAL commandos who were publicly identified as State Department...

We've received many emails over the last week or so from readers asking us to get to the bottom of this situation/rumors du jour...I'm not sure that we can actually do that quickly, but here is what we've been hearing... First of all, over the last week there have been many reports that the AFRICOM commander, GEN Carter Ham, had been arrested by his second in command and relieved of command. The reasoning in several articles from journalists and bloggers is that GEN Ham was ready to violate a do-not-assist order with regards to Benghazi. I would think that there...

CBS News has learned that during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Obama Administration did not convene its top interagency counterterrorism resource: the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG). "The CSG is the one group that's supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies,"

Barack Obama faces not one but two perfect storms. He actually may be grateful for the meteorological one if it predictably helps obscure the political one at least for the next week. Hurricane Sandy is, of course, a disaster no one would welcome. Untold numbers of Americans are having their lives endangered, or at least severely disrupted, and the potential economic harm is unimaginable at this point. The president could nonetheless see a silver lining in this horrific “weather event.” For one thing, he gets to posture as the leader of the nation in a terrible time of testing, the...

A senior U.S. Intelligence official discounted a Fox news report from last Friday that said officials within the CIA chain of command denied repeated requests from its officers on the ground to assist during the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. The official insisted that the CIA operators on the ground were in charge of their movements and the safety of those who were preparing to respond was also an important consideration. "There were no orders to anybody to stand down in providing support," the official said. The official detailed the minute by minute account of what they say...

As was noted on AT recently, a retired State Department Foreign Service Officer said: "Our Benghazi facility was a half-baked operation. It was not a consulate. It was a 'facility' with an ambiguous purpose, at least as far as the unclassified world is concerned." If it was not a consulate, then it was not sovereign United States territory. This fact has important legal consequences -- as was only just touched upon (at ~13:00, but pick up at ~10:00 for full context) by Newt Gingrich on Fox News in his appearance on Greta Van Susteren's Oct. 30 show (caution: auto-play).One of...

Once a mob began attacking the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on the night of Sept. 11, officials in Washington, D.C., watched with alarm. Now, new details are emerging about their response to the deadly attack. President Obama and his entire national security team monitored what was going on half a world away. Army Gen. Carter Ham, who was the regional commander for Africa, happened to be in Washington that day. One source familiar with the events said there was a sense of urgency. The consulate was burning, and Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was visiting the consulate with a small...

Due to stonewalling and the complicity of the Big Media in ignoring or downplaying the Benghazi story during the last weeks of the campaign, the Obamaites may get past the post on Nov. 6 without being called to account. But the truth is coming out, and an accounting is coming. For the character, competence and credibility of Obama’s entire national security team have been called into question. Hillary Clinton said she takes full responsibility for any security failure by her department at the Benghazi compound. But what does that mean? Did she see the Aug. 16 secret cable sent to...

The CIA rushed security operatives to an American diplomatic compound in Libya within 25 minutes after it had come under attack and played a more central role in the effort to fend off a night-long siege than has been publicly acknowledged, U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday. The agency mobilized the evacuation effort, took control of an unarmed U.S. military drone to map possible escape routes, dispatched an emergency security team from Tripoli, the capital, and chartered aircraft that ultimately carried surviving U.S. personnel to safety on Sept. 12, U.S. officials said. The account, which was provided to news organizations Thursday...

When the initial reports of the Benghazi attacks began to surface along with reports detailing attacks on the Embassies in Cairo and Sanaa on September 11th, I wasn’t surprised. Like many other Americans, I assumed that those in the Embassies were prepared for this contingency given their locations and the symbolic date. I was saddened to hear of Ambassador Chris Stevens’s death as well as the “other Americans,” and my sadness was deepened when I learned that two of the Americans killed in the attack along with the Ambassador were former Navy SEALs, one of whom was a friend and...

by Clare LopezIf reporting from the Washington Times is accurate, it looks like the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin was in on the plot to attack the U.S. mission in Benghazi. According to an October 27, 2012 report, Libyan witnesses from the Benghazi neighborhood where the U.S. compound was located told reporters from the Associated Press (AP) that "150 bearded gunmen, some wearing the Afghan-style tunics favored by Islamic militants began sealing off the streets" leading to the facility "around nightfall."The Department of State "Background Briefing on Libya," provided by telephone to reporters on October 9, 2012 states that...

As he left his Marine One helicopter Wednesday evening and walked to the residence of the White House, President Obama did not respond to a question shouted out by ABC News’s Mary Bruce about when he would begin to provide answers to the numerous questions building up about what exactly what went wrong in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. The president smiled and continued walking. Perhaps he couldn’t hear the question over the din of the chopper’s blades, but either way the smile and wave – almost Reagan-esque in style – underline the apparent strategy the president specifically and...

Full title - "Arab TV Report Exposes Lax Security At U.S. Consulate In Benghazi Prior To Ambassador Stevens' Arrival And Security Breach Prior To Attack – Revealed By Documents Gathered At Consulate Following Attack" On November 1, 2012, Alaan TV, a UAE channel, stated in a report on the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi that letters found inside the consulate, written by the U.S. Consular staff and addressed to the Libyan Foreign Ministry and the Benghazi police chief, revealed security breaches at the consulate. According to the letters, not only had a Libyan policeman photographed the compound 15...

ARAB MEDIA Leaks Sensitive US Documents From Benghazi Consulate â€“ US Officials Pleaded For More Security Posted by Jim Hoft on Thursday, November 1, 2012, 2:45 PM Unbelievable! It took the FBI several days to reach the Benghazi and investigate the 9-11 terrorist attacks that left four Americans dead.The FBI stayed for three hours. They left behind several sensitive documents that were later scooped up by regional media outlets.Today, Alaan TV, a UAE channel, revealed that letters found inside the consulate, written by the U.S. Consular staff and addressed to the Libyan Foreign Ministry and the Benghazi police chief, revealed...

I've been invited onto the Brian Wilson Show in Toledo Ohio to discuss Benghazi, and the military rescue that was aborted. This steraming link is pretty solid, I already checked it, using my FB account for a login. I'll be on between 3:35 and the top of the hour. (Travis McGee AKA Matt Bracken) http://www.iheart.com/live/1857/?autoplay=true

For the sixth night in a row, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News refused to give one single second of coverage to a Fox News report that the Obama Administration denied help to those attacked and killed by terrorists at the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11. According to a Media Research Center analysis, ABC, CBS, and NBC have failed to cover this devastating story - not to confirm it, not to knock it down, and never mind do their own investigation. The story broke last Friday, long before Hurricane Sandy swamped the news cycle....

BENGHAZI,Libya—More than six weeks after the shocking assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi--and nearly a month after an FBI team arrived to collect evidence about the attack-the battle-scarred,fire-damaged compound where Ambassador Chris Stevens and another Foreign Service officer lost their lives on Sept.11 still holds sensitive documents and other relics of that traumatic final day,including drafts of two letters worrying that the compound was under "troubling" surveillance and complaining that the Libyan government failed to fulfill requests for additional security. When we visited on Oct.26 to prepare a story for Dubai based Al Aan TV,we found not only Stevens's...

Catherine Herridge: This is the Smoking Gun Warning of a Coming Attack in Benghazi The cable went straight to Hillary Clinton's office. "I really believe, having read it, that it is the smoking gun warning here. You've got this emergency meeting in Benghazi, less than a month before the attack. At that briefing, the people are told that there are ten, ten, Islamic militias and al-Qaeda groups in Benghazi. The consulate can not sustain a coordinated attack and they need extra help. This information goes directly to the office of the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So, again, you have...

Advertisement According to blog site beforeitsnews.com, CIA sources have confirmed that President Barack Obama ordered military and intelligence assets not to defend or rescue ambassador Christopher Stevens as the American consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi were being attacked by terrorists last month. Reports are also surfacing that claim White House officials, including the president, was fed real-time video footage from two aerial drones while the seven-hour long attack was underway.

A Libyan policeman was caught photographing the inside of the US Consulate in Benghazi on the morning of September 11, hours before US Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in a terror attack there, and worried US consular staff complained to the Libyan Foreign Ministry over the security breach, an Arabic TV station reported on Thursday, quoting from letters found at the consulate after it was attacked. Alaan TV, a channel based in the United Arab Emirates, said the letters also showed that the Americans had been urging the Libyan authorities to provide special security arrangements for Stevens’ visit — including...

First in a sprawling series on Fox News’s Oct. 26 Benghazi story. It happens now and again in the world of news. An organization comes up with a stunning news report, and other outlets decline to follow up on the news. They just stay quiet. A number of scenarios are possible: 1) The outlet just has much better sources than the rest of the media; 2) The story is bunk; 3) The story is true, but the news contradicts what the rest of the media has already reported. Last Friday, Fox News came up with a conversation-driver. A piece under...

The White House continues to offer only this line on Benghazi: The White House on Wednesday shot down rumors that President Obama nixed an operation to rescue U.S. diplomats under attack in Benghazi after former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich made the claim on national television.“Neither the President nor anyone in the White House denied any requests for assistance in Benghazi during the attack,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told The Hill via e-mail.Gingrich told Fox News Tuesday evening that he'd been told by a “fairly reliable” U.S. senator that at least two news networks have emails “from...

Concerning the 9/11 assault on the consulate in Benghazi, the crux of the issue during that tragic night is whether our military should have done nothing or should have tried to do something. The president said he immediately directed that all actions be taken by our military to secure our personnel. Since then, he has made clear that he expects fast action when he gives a directive. “You return everybody’s phone calls in 15 minutes,” Obama said at a news conference on October 31. “Whether it’s the mayors, the governors, county officials, if they need something, we figure out a...